that ended world war i, the allied push to end the stalemate on the western front in the summer of 1918.

>> i will be your chair for today's program called, "your fatwa can does not apply here." we also welcome our guests from the turkish parliament and welcome our listening and internet office and invite everyone to visit us online at www.commonwealthclub.org. and now it is my pleasure to introduce our distinguished speaker. a veteran of more than 20 years of human rights research and activism, karima bennoune has served as a legal adviser at amnesty international and has taught at rutgers and the university of michigan. she's widely published on issues of fundamentalism and counterterrorism. would you please welcome professor bennoune. [applause]

>> thank you so much for being here today. it's really an honor for me to be here. i particularly would like to thank the commonwealth club for inviting me and for coordinating this event, and dina for the lovely introduction. so what i want to do today is to share with you a few excerpts from my book, "your fatwa does not apply here." and i want to explain as well why i wrote this book. it was a very big project. i actually interviewed about 300 people of husband limb heritage from nearly -- muslim heritage from nearly 30 muslim-majority countries from afghanistan to mali. and i did this specifically to learn about their work combating extremism or their own experiences of persecution at the hands of fundamentalists. the people i met were incredibly diverse, i think that's one of the most important things to note about the project. so i interviewed sheikhs, religious scholars and bloggers.

i interviewed housewives and sexual rights activists. i interviewed people who excused themself to pray in the middle of interviews and other people who toasted the birthday of the prophet muhammad with a glass of wine. so, again, this tremendous diversity. i interviewed an imam's daughter in niger who promotes the u.n. women's rights convention which, unfortunately, the u.s. hasn't ratified yet. but she does this believing that the women's rights convention is entirely reconcilable with her own muslim faith. i interviewed maria bashir, the only woman chief prosecutor in afghanistan, who has 23 bodyguards and yet despite the threats, despite the actual attempts on her life continues to prosecute in cases of violence against women and corruption, and all the while fears that the united states and the international community may be about to sell out afghan women in the bid to, quote, reconcile with the taliban.

and the question that i asked myself time and again is why are these people not more well known internationally. everyone knows who osama bin laden was, but very few people know about all of those on the ground who are challenging people like him. and what i really set out to do in this book is to change that or at least to contribute a little bit toward that change. now, i did this for very personal reasons, because my own father was an anthropologist of muslim heritage and risked his life throughout the 1990s to stand up to extremism in his home country of algeria. and what i remember is that even when he was driven from his home and forced to stop teaching at the university due to death threats from the fundamentalist armed groups, he remained inside algeria, and he continued to publish pointed criticisms of both the fundamentalists and the government that they fought. this a three-part series -- in a

three-part more series published in the newspaper back in november of 1994, a very terrible time in what was called the dark decade in algeria, my father produced an article called "how fundamentalism produced a terrorism without precedent." and in that article he denounced what he called the terrorists' radical break with true islam as it was lived by our ancestors. now, the algerian democrats, as they called themselves, like my father and many others unfortunately received very little support internationally at the time including from the international human rights community where i was working. and it often seemed as though the international community could not understand what was happening on the ground in algeria, because generally people did not grasp the threat to human rights from the ideology of islamism itself. this was pre-9/11 era. and let he stress, the ideology of islamism -- which is an entirely different thing than the religion of islam which is

practiced by so many people in so many different ways, more than a billion people in the world. but i think that this misunderstanding of the nature of the threat of the ideology of islamism to the human rights of people of muslim heritage themselves actually persists today. ask i would argue that we can see this at the moment in the press coverage of what is happening in countries like egypt, for example. now, doing this kind of work on the front lines without international support, without even interor national comprehension -- international comprehension of the challenge that you face is an incredibly lonely endeavor, and i have seen this firsthand. as a malian lawyer told me back in december of 2012 at a time when the entire northern half of her country was under jihadist occupation, she said: international solidarity is very helpful. when you live such a crisis alone, it is hutch more difficult -- much more difficult to bear. so what my book is really about is trying to break this wall of

loneliness and silence by connecting the people who are doing these struggles on the ground to people around the world who stand for similar values of tolerance and equality and against discrimination and violence. so before i tell you a few of the stories, i think i should say something about what i mean when i use the term muslim fundamentalism which, of course, is itself a controversial term. i give in the book the definition by the algerian sociologist who writes about fundamentalisms -- note the s -- not just within islam, but fundamentalisms which she defines as political movements of the extreme right which in a context of globalization manipulate religion in order to achieve their political aims. now, the pakistani postcolonial theorists have likewise described this as the radical politicization of theology. so what we're talking about here is a political project, not a spiritual or religious one.

thousand, i have to be -- now, i have to be careful of projecting there's some sort of monolith that is the same everywhere, especially in a short talk like today. these movements, too, have their own diversities. some do not use or advocate violence, and others do. i do think we can cautiously generalize about certain shared characteristics, the most significant of which are, in my view, number one, a belief in the imp decision of something -- imposition of something called the sharia. in fact, unitary, monolithic and are to be imposed on all muslims everywhere. and second, the ultimate goal of creating what they deem to be islamic states, and many muslims would dispute entirely their definition of what an islamic state should be like. and that state is to be ruled by that unitary version of religious laws that they advocate. now, these movements have been on the rise since the iranian revolution in particular, and we find them manifesting as political parties, as armed

movements, sometimes even as nongovernmental organizations. now, in response to these movements in the contemporary period, western discourse has sometimes seemed to offer only two choices. that is, number one, the openly discriminatory or flawed characterization of all of this that suggests that somehow islam is inherently fundamentalist or all muslims are fundamentalist and so on, and that is clearly not only fencive, but just plain wrong. and one hears this sometimes on the right in the west. unfortunately, on the left as well one sometimes hears responses that are too politically incorrect to even broach the subject at all. and neither of these sets of responses is accurate or helpful, and both do a grave disservice to the people who are living on the front lines. so what i'm trying to create is another way of talking about this in the west. now, i should say as the backdrop to all of this that i am painfully aware that there has been a rise in

discrimination against muslims in the last few years in this country as articulated in the far right's attack on president obama as a sort of punitive muslim which seems to have become a kind of offense. but my view is that even this does not mean that silence on the topic of muslim fundamentalism is appropriate or productive. and, in fact, my contention is that one of the key ways to challenge discriminatory notions about people of muslim heritage is precisely to display their diversity and that one of the ways to do that is to tell the stories of those who are practicing muslims, those who are ago knostic of muslim heritage or even atheist who have been victims of fundamentalism and who have chosen very bravely to challenge fundamentalist movements. that's the project of my book. and with the remainder of my time, i want to introduce you to a few of these people. it's difficult to pick favorite stories, because they've all become very dear to my heart. let me start with a story from

the first chapter which is called "creativity versus the dark corner." and this is a chapter about artists, visual artists, performing artists who i met in places like pakistan, in algeria, people who were refugees from somalia, and it's no accident, i think, that this virtually every context i visited or studied, artists were challenging extremism either through simply continuing to perform their art or through its very content. and one of the people i met early on this the research was a gentleman named faison who at the time was the around thetistic director of the theater workshop in lahore, pakistan. and since 1992, faison and his family and the production company that they ran -- which was named after their playwright father -- brought some 24,000 performing artists from 86 countries to perform in pakistan and simultaneously promoted the

work and the performances of local pakistani artists as well in the areas of dance and music and puppetry. they brought joy to generations of pakistani art lovers. but at the height of jihadi violence this pakistan in 2008 -- in pakistan in 2008, they became a target, and they began to receive threats to call off their events which they were told were sinful by those who were calling and threatening. they refused to heed these warnings. so in 2008 a jihadi bomber actually struck their eighth performing arts festival in lahore with three separate bombings producing what he described as a rain of glass that fell, injuring nine. now, the bomber's accomplice was a 12-year-old potato chip vendor who had come into the venue car ilying ieds along with his pacts of crisps, and it was very upsetting because there were so many children in the audience at the event as well. luckily, the boy was caught

before he was able to detonate his devices. so the zetas then faced a terrible decision; their festival had been hit, people had been injured, there was a threat that the attacks would continue. should they call off the performing arts festival? and they were, brothers and sisters, debating this question. and he told me at about one in the morning they decided, you know, as he said it, ladies and gentlemen, this ain't going to work. this festival is going to continue. and as he said to the bbc at the time, if we bow down the islamists, there will never be anything, and we'll just be sitting in a dark corner. so they announced their festival would continue the next day. and what happened? thousands of people, more than they had ever had in their audiences before, poured into the venue to show their support for performing arts in lahore and is their opposition to -- and their opposition to the womanners. and that festival was able to go on and continue until its scheduled conclusion. but he was terrified as well.

he was delighted, but he saw a young woman coming into the venue with her two small children, and he ran up to her and said you do know there was a bomb here yesterday, and you do know there's a threat there will be a bomb here today. and she said, i used to come to your festival with my mother, and i still have these images in my mind. and she understood that the only way for her children to be able to have a cultural life was for people to be there at that event. now, the next year, unfortunately, they lost their sponsors and could not put on the festival. but two years later, in 2010, i was able to attend the first event that they were able to do in the very same venue. so there we sit in the spot where the bombs went off, watching schoolgirls performing a hugal in punjabi called the knot. and the play's subtitle is "don't tie your tail to a coward." it's about animals. and i remember thinking no one in this venue has done that. the auditorium was absolutely

packed. now, this was a remarkae thing. this was a time in pakistan when the taliban were blowing up girls' schools, and here these schoolgirls were dancing and singing and playing mice and water buffalo on stage. but you could see faison in the front leaning forward as though he could leap onto the stage at any moment if necessary to protect the girls. but the play concluded successfully, and everyone exhaled and burst into applause, and some were weeping. and you could see the sense of hope that people had that children's theater, in peace, is still possible. and when i left the venue that night, i was actually filled with a tremendous sense of hope. first, because faison's teenage daughter told me that in spite of everything that had happened, she wanted to grow up and become a theater director like her father. and second, because when i was leaving the venue, i came across the free drawing space in the event, and someone had written two words which summed it all up: no fear.

so the longest chapter in the book is, i think, unsurprisingly the chapter on women's rights defenders. because everywhere i went women were in the forefront of the struggle against extremism. that chapter of the book is called "the imam's liberated daughter and other stories: women battling beyond stereotypes." and i think the relationship between women's rights and fundamentalism was very well explained to me by a sociologist in the wes african nation of niger -- west african nation of niger who was deeply worried about the rise thousand of al-qaeda terrorism in her country, actually targeting health care workers and so on. and she said something very, very smart to me that became kind of the theme for the chapter on women's rights defend beers. she said, every step forward for women's rights is a piece of the struggle against fundamentalism. and i think that's a very important thing for policymakers to think about. women's rights are not something you can sort of trade away to gain peace with extremists.

women's rights go to the core of the struggle against fundamentalism. now, one of those engaged in that struggle whom i met along the way was a 70-year-old retired college professor from senegal who heads an organization called the network of women living under muslim laws. she's very angry when i meet her about a spate of recent sentences of women to corporal punishment, like a 23-year-old condemned to stoning for adultery in sudan. every day, she says, there is a case of women being attacked for what they wear or what they do. i find this very depressing. a racking muslim -- practicing muslim herself, she stresses she does not rezissis lam, but rather an islamist discourse that is, in her view, aggressive and offensive and crystallizes around the rights of women. now, i asked her whether secular or religious discourse on women's rights was more useful in challenging fundamentalism, and she insisted that the best approach depended on the

context. in certain places, she said, it may be entirely appropriate to make what are sometimes called islamic feminist arguments, that is within religion and religious law. however, for her as a senegalese, i refuse to reinterpret the quran to change the family law. i am not going to enter into the religious debate. i do not want to close myself off. and she argues that above all else the strategy for combating fundamentalism must be a political one that takes the debate off what she calls the religious terrain where they wish to trap us. now, across the age spectrum from her, i met another woman who was 19 years old at the time i met her in kabul, afghanistan, and a college student. she had just founded an organization called young women for change which did something rather remarkable this july of 2011 -- in july of 2011. they organized a street protest against harassment of women. they carried banners that said

things like i have the right to walk freely in my city. hearkening back to fetu's comments, in their flyers they both made the argument that street harassment is anti-islamic because the prophet muhammad said nobody but those who are inferior in character will disrespect women. and they also asserted in human rights terms that women are equal to men and deserve the same dignity. now, before the march took place, she gave interviews on afghan tv and subsequently she received threats via e-mail, facebook and over the phone. but she refused to give up. her only fear, rather like faison, was that she would put other women in danger. but they held the march, and it was a success. fifty women and a few male supporters walked through the dusty streets of ca all -- kabul, passing out flyers against street harassment. now, all along the route they were harassed and catcalled at various points. some supported them.

but she saw it as a victory, and there was one thing in particular that really struck her, and this was that the afghan policemen who had been assigned to monitor this demonstration who had started off perhaps being a pit skeptical about the march, when they saw the harassment of young women as they marched through the streets were so affected by it that they took the flyers, and they began passing them out themselves and, in fact, shouting back at those who were heckling the women. now, she was very worried about the future of her country and what will happen when international troops leave next year, and think there's good reason to be worried, and i hope we will continue to engage with and remember afghanistan. but somehow she remains positive about the future. now, she said, and this is a striking thing to hear a 19-year-old say, i may not be alive to see the day, but i think dreaming is important. our daughters will be able to walk in this country.

i think i have, what, about five minutes? five minutes left, so i will tell one more story, and i wish that i could tell so many more, but you can find them in the book. you can also find them on the book's web site if i can't get to all of them. so i want to end with a story from my father's home country of algeria. and in algeria in the 1990s, the armed fundamentalist groups battled the state, but primarily they targeted the civilian population. and we don't though the exact numbers, but they've killed somewhere between 100 and 200,000 people. and i want to end with the story of one of those people whose name was -- [inaudible] because to me, her life is a reminder of how urgent the need is to counter extremism and to support those who are doing that and trying to do that. now, she had said to her father i will study law, and you will always have your head high. and she was a 22-year-old law student this algeria with the same dreams of a legal career

that i had back in the '90s. she refused to give up her studies despite the fact that the fundamentalist groups threatened anyone who continued their university education. on january 26, 1997, 16 years ago, she boarded the bus in algiers where she was studying to go home and spend a ramadan evening with her family, and she would never finish law school as a result. when the wuss arrived outside -- bus arrived outside her hometown, it was stopped at a checkpoint manned by men from the armed islamic group. carrying her school wag, she was taken off the bus and killed in the street this front of all of the other passengers. the men who cut her throat then told the others who had watched, if you go to the university, the day will come when we will kill all of you just like this. now, she died at exactly 5:17 p.m. which we know because when she fell in the street, her watch broke, and it still reads

5:17. her mother showed me the watch, and the thing i noted when i looked at it is the way that the secondhand still aims optimistically upward toward a 5:18 that would never come for her. shortly before her death, she had told her mother, m mom, please put this in your head: nothing will happen to us, god willing. but if something happens to us -- and she was talking about herself and her sisters who were also students -- if something happens to us, you and dad, you must know that we are dead for knowledge. you must hold your heads high. as is the case with so many of the case of thousands of algerians murdered in the '90s and the smaller numbers killed in the state's harsh counterterrorist response, no one has ever been brought to justice for her murder. most of the murderers were amnestied under the 2005 charter for peace and national reconciliation. and i should say here clearly that while i believe that the only way to advance toward real

democracy and human rights in these regions is to defeat fundamentalism, especially because fundamentalism seeks to exploit any and every democratic opening, i also believe that that defeat has to be accomplished in ways that themselves respect human rights and international law like the peaceful struggles detailed in my book. and i return again to the memory of the watch stopped at 5:17, a truly unimaginable loss. but as i did the research and as i wrote "your fatwa does not apply here," i found hope just like her name, which means hope. i found hope in two things. the first is the strength of her family to continue telling her story despite official amnesia. and also in going on with their lives. in fact, her sister overcame her own grief, went to law school in her sister's memory and today practices as a lawyer in algiers, something that is only possible because the fundamentalist armed groups did

not take power in the country. but i also find something that is a source of hope much more broadly, and that is that, for me, she lives on today wherever or women and men continue to fight against fundamentalism peacefully. like the protesters this summer did in turkey or in tunisia. so for me, m.l.'s hope live on wherever people continue, as she did, to strive for knowledge even in the face of extremism and, as she said, to keep their heads held high. and i would hope if i asked you if you're moved by these stories, please to help me honor them by sharing them. and ultimately, what this book is really about comes from the slogan of the association of algerian victims of islamist terrorism. and what they really put sort of at the center of their work, at the heart of their work is what they call the duty of memory.

and i think what that is about is about learning from this history so that we and others do not have to relive it. thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you, professor bennoune. now it's time for the question and answer period. i'm dina inrahim, your moderator for today. we have a large number of questions, so let's begin. to what extent are are local islamic fundamentalism movements being used as a vehicle for advocating social or political change, and are there other avenues pressing for change, therefore bypassing the movement? >> do you want to take a few at a time? >> do you want to do that? sure. what is the attraction of islamic fundamentalism? who are these people?

what happened to government protection? are there arrests, trials? what happens to violent islamists? >> so maybe we better start with three. thank you very much for these good questions. certainly, in certain contexts these movements consider themselves to be advocating political change. sometimes social change, although more often, i think, the social aspect of their project is more about charity than actually shifting the distribution of wealth. and what we've seen is that when some of these movements come into power, what they don't really have is a political agenda for running a modern society. and i think this is what happened in egypt. and i always think of a wonderful quote from an egyptian women's rights advocate. she said, look, saying -- [speaking in native tongue] over a broken pipe won't fix it. saying islam is the solution, it looks great on a poster.

but what do you do then when you're trying to provide health care and when your job is to sort of build schools and make a modern economy function? so, you know, what kind of political and social change exactly are these movements advocating? they seem to be preoccupied, as we see with the far right here sometimes as well, with certain social issues often having to do with women and sexuality. the question about the attraction of fundamentalists, i think this is a great question, and, again, i think the answer to be a good one would have to be context-specific. but we don't else inly have the -- necessarily have the time for that, so if you'll forgive me, i will generalize a little bit. i think it depends on what is going on in the particular country. i think sometimes fundamentalists have positioned themselves as being against corruption although as we have seen now in the last few years when they get into power, they seem to just carry on the tradition of corruption they have inherited. sometimes sort of accelerating it. and now they have a religious

cover to use that makes it even more difficult to criticize them. i think, you know, that has been part of it. certainly, the repressive nature of some of the regimes that they are battling, i think, made them seem like a better alternative to some people in certain contexts. but very often what we've seen is they represent simply a continuation or a worsening of that repression. and i think of a tunisian journalist who i interviewed, and she was somebody who was a staunch opponent of ben ali. and at first was sort of hopeful that when they took power in tunisia would represent in some way a step forward. but she said that within about six months she understood that they didn't mean for there to be a transition at all. they simply meant for them to be in power now running the same system. as she said, these were not revolutionaries in her, this her view. in her view. the attraction of these movements, i think, in any context using the rhetoric of religion and claiming to speak in the name of god can be very

persuasive and appealing to people. and, again, what a wonderful tunisian activist said to me, and i want to put this on t-shirts, no one has the right to appoint himself the spokesperson of good. and i think, you know, that's absolutely right. but sometimes these movements do that, and that can make them very attractive. government protection. this is a very big question in the context where the fundamentalists are in nongovernmental roles and are attacking the population. very often we've seen that governments have not done what was required of them. that was the case in algeria back in the early '90s. i tell the story in the book where there was a season in early 1993 where the fundamentalist armed groups had started targeting intellectuals. and every tuesday morning early in the morning as one newspaper described it, a researcher would fall to the bullets of the fundamentalist arms groups. and one tuesday somebody started

pounding on the door at our house. i have to say we ultimately never did figure out who it was, but my father was absolutely terrified not for himself. he assumed the risk that he had taken, but because i was there with him in the apartment, and he actually called the police, and nobody answered the phone. now, to be fair to the algerian police, they were being slaughtered in very large numbers. they were among the first waves of people to be killed. this is happening in egypt now as well. so i recognize that some police actually took very serious risks as did some soldiers in that context to try to protect the population. but very often the regimes are much more interested in protecting their own interests, and they, too, are frightened of the truly democratic opposition. and so may not have all the motivation that they should have to protect that population. and that's why i think the international community has to speak up. so, for example, i spent the summer in tunisia. there was an assassination of a gentleman while i was there in july who was a deputy in the

constituent assembly. very outspoken critic of the government. and now we find out from press reports it seems that, in fact, they were warned by foreign intelligence agencies ahead of time that he was going to be targeted, and they did nothing whatsoever to protect him. and some on the ground -- i cannot, you know, prove this one way or another -- some on the ground suggest they may have been involved. i think the international community absolutely has to speak up and put pressure on the authorities like the tunisian authorities to protect these people who are challenging extremism. sorry. long answers, but they're great questions. >> on the issue of speaking up, i think the next cluster of questions tend to address that in their own way, so this set of questions has to do with speaking up. so who is responsible for the lack of voices heard from the islamic world criticizing the fundamentalists? that's one. with a big population of muslims in the u.s., why do peace-loving

and moderate muslim people not vocal, denouncing full fundamentalists and their atrocities? and this one is a good one, often the issue of authenticity arises. do you find that secular individuals when speaking out against muslim fundamentalism are dismissed for not being authentic muslims? if so, how do secular individuals make their voices heard? >> i was warped that -- warned that there would be great questions. [laughter] those are all really great questions. the first question about the lack of voices. i would say transnationally there really is no lack of voices. those voices do not get the microphone. and that was really part of what my work was about, trying to meet so many of these people who may be working in languages other than english, whose work is not making it here. somebody asks me the other day what can we do to help. one of the key things is to get some of these people's work in err due, in arabic transferred and read here and heard here.

that is so very important. and it is hard sometimes to make yourself heard even when you write in english. so at the time of the tenth an verse roy of -- anniversary of september 11th, 2001, an event i felt very, very strongly about -- i lived in the new york area for ten years after 9/11 -- i wrote a piece called "why i hate al-qaeda" which is, basically, a person of secular muslim heritage's sort of denunciation of this kind of extreme terrorism that has claimed the lives of so many both in the 9/11 attacks, but in so many other attacks that get less attention elsewhere. i couldn't get it published. i tried so hard to get it published. it was finally adopted by a feminist international law blog, and it saw the light of day, and it's now in the book. but i do know that there are many people out there trying to make themselves be heard. but if you, you know, if you blow something up, it's very easy to get on tv. if you take an extreme position, if your position is let's be

moderate, let's look at the complexity of the situation, let's try to understand, it is much more difficult in this headline-driven world to be heard. and i think we need to change that. now i'm going to say something somewhat contradictory. it's going to sound contradictory, but one of my professors told me once you have to be able to think two things at the same time. at the same time i would like to say that while a lot is being done and a lot is being done we don't know about, much more must be done. and i would appeal this particular to those of us in the arab-american and muslim-american diasporas to be as courageous in speaking out as the people that i met this my book who are taking so many risks. and i know it's difficult to do this. it's a threatening environment sometimes with all of the vim that story language that we hear in some context against muslims. and i would say if americans generally are wondering what can you do to facilitate more of this discourse, part of it is

also in combating discrimination against muslims to create the space in which people can express themselves. there is some wonderful work being done. i was just in houston, and i met -- they came or very early on a saturday morning to see me. this was their level of commitment. there we were meeting at 8 a.m. on a saturday morning. some people in the pakistani community who have just founded the alliance for tolerance and compassion, and they are bringing pakistanis who are shiite and sunni together to counter sectarianism, to counter violence in their country and to try to really build a coalition around this opposition to extremism and violence. and i think these little efforts that are beginning to crystallize are so important even though much more can be done. authenticity. i'm so glad that somebody asked me about this, because this is a huge issue that comes up. or i think now this our minds in this era, we have a certain idea of what it means to be a muslim, whether it's a positive stereotype or a negative stereotype. it's a stereotype nonetheless

that if you are a muslim woman, you cover your head. everyone who comes from the middle east or north africa or muslim majority countries would call themselves first and foremost a muslim rather than perhaps a citizen of their country or a man or a woman or a member of their ethnic group or so on. i think we really generalized and stereotyped both in ways that are positive, in ways that are negative, but they stillened up being generalizations that don't reflect the complex, lived reality on the ground. and people of muslim heritage have just as many relationships with their heritage as people of any other religious background. some believe, some don't. some practice, some don't. some practice in different ways. some practice, but it's still not the way they would choose to identify themselves. they would say i'm pakistani, i'm turkish, i'm algerian, i'm south asian and so on. and i think if there is one single thing i'm asking people to do, it's to recognize the

incredible, rich diversities of those we similarly now call muslim. simply now call muslim. >> a member of audience says, i've worked in international development for almost 15 years. i've lived in afghanistan, egypt and iraq. this dialogue has been ongoing all these years. prior to 9/11, activists were calling for intervention in afghanistan because of the treatment of women and nothing happened. haven't we reached a point of going beyond dialogue? >> so i guess i take that question as whether i ever think the use of force is necessary. and i should say that, yes, i do believe that sometimes the use of force is necessary in certain contexts when you are confronting armed salafi jihadi groups who believe themselves to be at war with the state or alleged or actual armed occupiers and are killing large numbers of the civilian population. but i also believe, and that was the point i tried to express at the end, that that use of

force -- whether a local one or an international one -- has to be carried out with respect for international law, both humanitarian law in terms of not targeting the civilian population, avoiding civilian casualties and so on, but also respecting the u.n. charter rules on when force may be used. and i also think that if we do use force, we must follow through. and this, to me, is the tragedy of afghanistan. i actually make a distinction between the conflict in afghanistan which i believe was legal and the conflict in iraq which i believe was not. very often in the u.s., especially on the left, people sort of assimilate these two conflicts. i think they're actually very different. but where we got with afghanistan wrong was then going into iraq, not spending the money on the ground for development that people were so thirsty for. i went to afghanistan back many 2005, and so many people were so glad that the taliban had been overthrown. and i'm talking about ordinary people. taxi drivers, not just political

activists or women's rights advocates. but we sort of took our eye off the ball .follow through, and now i really fear situation we're going the leave afghans in. one of the afghan women whom i interviewed for the book, very prominent human rights activist who lost family back in the terrible conflict in the 1990s when the international community had forgotten what happened in her country and completely disengaged, she said to me, look, when the international troops leave, if the international community does not continue to care about what happens here, we will find ourselves in a worse situation than we were in before. and my great fear is that, you know, women's rights and social issues will be seen as sort of the bargaining chip that west can make peace now with the taliban, we're hearing this oxymoron, the moderate taliban. as she said, if they're moderate, why are they taliban? and my fear is in our rush to try and get out of afghanistan with some form of honor intact,

that we will be willing to make those concessions and, in fact, leave a very terrible situation on the ground. and i think of another woman i interviewed, the head of after began's national human rights commission, who said everybody's talking about leaving afghanistan with their, with dignity, but they mean their dignity, not the dignity of the afghans. and we absolutely have toe are main -- have to remain dedicated. terrorism against afghans is equally important to terrorism against westerners and, in fact, the two things are related. sorry, that was a very long answer, but i think that was a very important question. >> so i think this question is answered by entire book. that's my two cents. but i'm going to go ahead and ask it anyway. what should moderate muslims, what should or actually could moderate muslims do in the face of islamist terrorism? >> there are so many creative things that can be done. let me give you one other example of what people did on

the ground, a story i didn't get to tell, which is about a women's group in algeria back in the '90s which means refuse in arabic, but it was also the acronym of the organization. and what they would do after bomb attacks is go out and protest at the bomb crater. they would show up, the police would say we can't recollect you, this goes back to the question about protection, we can't protect you, and they'd say we're staying, and they would fill up the bomb craters with flowers. and they actually mobilized thousands and thousands of people over time. not political activists, ordinary people who had just had enough to go out and have these maas demonstrations -- mass demonstrations at a very dangerous time when the demonstrations themselves could and sometimes did become targets. and while the efforts of the algerian security forces were very important, obviously, in curbing the worst of the terrorism, this popular mobilization was absolutely critical. so, you know, that's just to give you one example of what people can do on the front

lines. but i do think we need to do much more every single time there is an attack here to be seeking out on the internet, having web sites, issuing statements. and we're right, you know, in the arab and muslim populations in the u.s., there are organizations that work against discrimination that will tend to speak out, for example, when there are u.s. violations of the rights of muslims here or israeli violations of palestinian rights, and i support all of that. but we need to be just as vigilant and just as outspoken. i mean, it shocks me that almost every week there are scores of iraqis killed in ordinary iraqi men and women killed in sectarian violence and this fundamentalist terrorism. and i don't hear us being as vocal as we should be about that. ask over time you become inoured to to that. it's just as a friend of mine called it, the third world body count. you don't even notice after a while. but i think if we responded each time with a forceful statement,

over time that could begin to make a difference. ask as dina so rightly put it, i would say the rest of the answer is in the book. which is fabulous, by the way. i could not put it down. >> i really couldn't. and i was in tears for many parts of it as well because the people she interviewed are so incredibly brave. in circumstances that are just beyond our imagination, you know, we really have it pretty good here. we're living in a cushy society, and these are folks who are really putting their lives on the line to struggle against extremism. now, part of the solution, one of the suggestions here, is isn't the solution to get to the source of funding of fundamentalists as in follow the money? >> absolutely. and this is, this is very critical. many of these fundamentalist movements receive copious amounts of funding from the gulf in particular, and i think this is another place the u.s. needs

to ask some questions about its own policy and why we have been such strong supporters of some of these gulf regimes, why we have called them moderate when they are anything but, for example. in saudi arabia, women can't even drive. and one of the things you hear quite angrily is we don't want to be like the gulf, you know? they have a right, they can live the way they want, but we're nothing like them. we don't want to live like them. and even in the gulf context i would say there are new wahhabi ways of living that are being imposed on people that do not reflect at all on how people used to live 20 and 30 years ago. i heard those stories again and again. i know in egypt the external funding of the salafi party was a huge issue to the tune of hundreds of millions of pown pounds. this is a very significant issue in tunisia as well. and, you know, the question is what kind of resources are there to support their opponents. first of all, i mean, it's very interesting because they are

then hypocriteically criticized if they take external support which is rather absurd, frankly, given that what they actually receive -- and this was true in egypt -- is sort of minuscule compared to what their opponents are receiving. but i do think we need to follow the money, and we need to look at where our money has gone in the past. you know, the causes of fundamentalism are complex in any context. my dad was an anthropologist, and he would always say there are external and internal consequences, there are endogenous and exogenous causes, and you have to look at all of them. so i'm not putting the whole blame on external funding. if you look at our own role and the funding we poured into the knew ya hi dean in afghanistan because they were fighting the soviet union, and, in fact, we supported some of the most extreme mujahideen groups like one that's headed by -- [inaudible] and that had terrible consequences both on people in

afghanistan when the cold war was over, but also across the region because young, disaffected men came from as far away as indonesia, morocco, and in algeria this was a huge issue, and they participated in this, quote-unquote, jihad. and they got training and learned how to use weapons, and then they went back home to all of their countries, and this problem of armed salafi jihaddism really me tsatized -- metastasized. so i think following the money is absolutely critical. >> moving on to women, you talked to a lot of women. there's a question here about what will it take for women to realize their 50% contribution to this process? let me read the question from the beginning. it says as the twig is beat, so goes the tree. women are the first cause in the socialization of those who grow up to murder women and young girls. >> that's an interesting question. i mean, i certainly think that,

you know, women are implicated in all aspects of this problem just as men are. but i would say that so many women have really seized the responsibility and spoken out against fundamentalism and organized against fundamentalism, and i met them from a diversity of regions and contexts, saudi arabia, gaza, afghanistan, some of the stories that you heard, west africa and so on. so i do think that many women have, in fact, realized the critical role that they can, they can play. part of it, again, is that they really need support. i mean, they're really fighting an uphill battle and sometimes taking very great risks to fight that battle. and i think, for example, there is a small section in the chapter on women about some lesbian activists in pakistan that's not how they actually define themselves. they use, you know, sort of a different scripter, but that's

how we would define them here. and, in fact, i couldn't even use their name. but there they are on the ground in pakistan in a very difficult environment continuing in the ways that they can, sometimes even just through organizing a support group for what they call queer people to be able to meet each other and have a social life and even promoting some publications in what we would call the lgbt community there. so i think women are finding a diverse range of creative ways to take on this issue. and, again, what they really need is, i think, number one, networking to have sort of a transnational network of support that can compete with the transnational network of support that their opponents receive. and number two, funding. one other example i should give, i mentioned it briefly in the presentation is the network of women living under muslim laws which is a wonderful transnational network of women from west africa to south asia and beyond, also in diaspora populations, that allows women

to come together mostly nowadays through the internet and share strategies, what has worked, what have they been doing, get others to campaign on their issues so you have women in nigeria writing appeals for women if in sudan, trial observers going from malaysia to fiji and so on, this incredible model of transnational work. and i think that model is really one that needs to be supported to sort of facilitate the taking of responsibility that the question refers to. >> what is the difference between the brotherhood, the muslim brotherhood, and fundamentalism? so what is, essentially, the difference between organized -- [inaudible] the muslim brotherhood and salafi, the more conservative fundamentalist movements? >> you would get a lot of very different answers if you asked different people that question. and this is, of course, something that i struggled with in my book because i have to do

what legal academics would call strategically essentialize to be able to speak generally about phenomenon while still recognizing the particularities of these movements. and, you know, you can see the language i use to try to do that in the book. thousand, the muslim -- now, the muslim brotherhood is a transnational some would call political movement, social movement. it has political parties in different contexts. of course, it started in egypt, but we see it now in many, many different countries in the gulf, across north africa, tunisia, allied to the muslim brotherhood and so on. the salafis are often described as the most conservative. i don't think it's conservative, i think it's a radical project that is really very often about changing the way in which people live, not preserving the way many which they have lived. but, you know, they have kind of -- they're argued to have the most rigid interpretations of islam, of the quran and sometimes actually i would argue these interpretations seem to e

descend from outer space. i'm not sure quite where they're coming from. but here's something that's very important to note, and this is the controversial bit. if you talk to a lot of people on the ground in north africa right now who are con front -- confronting the fundamentalists, what they are very frustrated by is in the west we refer to the muslim brotherhood and its ilk as, quote, moderate because they are not as extreme as the sal byings -- salafis or even the openly-armed salafis. and the people on the ground who are doing this work will say, look, actually it is the muslim brotherhood, it is opening the door for the salafis that is opening the door for the armed movements, that is pushing us really in the direction of a more and more radical interpretation of islam. and so just because perhaps the salafis are even worse does not mean that you should use the label "moderate." you know, they always ask me what exactly does the term moderate mean, and a former student of mine in tunisia wrote

me this very acerbic e-mail where she suggested it means you kill your fellow muslims, you don't kill westerners. you're not engaged in al-qaeda-like terrorism. while it is important on the one hand, i think, to be careful ask to try to make distinctions, many people on the ground also see the relationships between these movements and these networks, and i think that's vital to understand as well. >> we'd like to remind our listening audience that this is a commonwealth club program called "your fatwa does not belong here." today's speaker is professor karima bennoune, author of book. i'm dr. dean that inrahim. unfortunately, we have time for only one last question, and that is, how are women and be moderate muslims faring in syria and egypt today? >> so you saved the easy question for last. [laughter] how are women faring in egypt

today, i think from what i've been hearing from some of the women that i interviewed in the book, there is a great deal of frustration about the lack of international understanding of what they're actually facing on the ground. many of those people certainly are critical of repression by the government or by the army, but they are also extremely critical of the violence of the muslim brotherhood and its supporters. and critical of the brotherhood's and the salafis' threats against christians, violence against christians, violence against christian institutions, violence against muslims who are known to speak out and oppose them. a few weeks ago there was a very moving op-ed in "the new york times," i was thrilled that it was there, from an egyptian journalist describing what his life is like now due to the level of threats that he is getting from members of the muslim brotherhood. and it reminded me so much of algeria in the 1990s. so i think it is so vital that we look at all of this range of

threats to human rights in egypt, and in particular engage with something that i talked about, and that is the challenge that the ideology of islamism itself poses for human rights. and that was the ideology that the muslim brotherhood sought to impose on the egyptian population when it was in power. and that was not at all the ideology that people revolted for back in 2011. they actually wanted more freedom, and what they got, unfortunately, was less. especially less freedom for women. now, as to syria, i would say that, you know, that is a very complex topic, unfortunately, somewhat beyond the scope of my ability to respond at the end of the presentation. but i would say, i would say this: one is i've heard very disturbing reports of sexual assault against women in syria, very grave rapes and so on perp rated -- perpetrated both by state forces, but also by armed groups. and i think, again, as i said in egypt, we have to look very

carefully at the threats to human rights posed both by the syrian regime, and those are very grave indeed, but also by some of the rebel groups, some of which are allied to al-qaeda. and i can tell you people in religious minorities and so on in syria are also very frightened of what it would meanthose rebel groups took over. for me, the most important thing is the debate can't be a simple one over whether we use force or we don't. and international community, i think, has to remain absolutely engaged not only with the issue of chemical weapons which is a critical one, but with the ongoing killings of syrians and, ultimately, really trying to produce a situation that, in fact, leads to a greater human rights protection in syria, including for women. and we've seen in the transitions in the arab world in the last few years that women often have a lot to lose in the transition. so any transition is not necessarily a good one. >> thanks to professor bennoune, author of "your fatwa does not

apply here." we also thank our audience here as well and to those listening to us on the radio and on the internet. and c-span. i'm dr. dina ibrahim, and i'd like to remind our audience there will be a book signing after the top so, please, feel free to stick around and get your copy signed by the professor. and this is also important, you can find out more on karima bennoune.com. karimabennoune.com. now this meeting of the commonwealth club of california celebrating 110 years of enlightened discussion is adjourned. [applause] nobs knox. [inaudible conversations]

>> you're watching booktv, 48 hours of nonfiction authors ask books every weekend on c-span c-span2. here are some programs to look out for. today at 5:15 p.m. eastern, brad peltser talks about his illustrated children's series, "ordinary people change the world." then at 11 p.m., p.j. o'rourke on the baby boom, how it got that way, and it wasn't my fault, and i'll never do it again. tomorrow at 5:30 p.m. eastern from booktv's college series, we speak with bonnie morris. ms. morris will also be our guest on "in depth" february 2nd. she'll answer viewer questions life for three ore hours. and -- hours. and at 10:30 p.m., larry schweikert presents "a patriot's history of the modern world: volume two." watch for these programs and more all weekend long on booktv. for a complete schedule, visit booktv.org.

>> most people don't really understand, you know, how it works. a lot of people write books, and then they spend the next two years trying to get somebody to publish their books. i've never really experienced that. so when people come to me and say how do you get a book published, i say, look -- [laughter] i'm the wrong person to ask. [laughter] but, you know, i finally felt that really i had something to say. i don't write books just for the purpose of writing books. the first three, four books, actually, i did with a co-writer. and basically i would sometimes dictate into a tape recorder and then send them the tapes, and then they would, you know, transcribe things. >> [inaudible] >> this last book i d myse

with my wife. you know, she did a lot of the research, and, you know, helped with the editing. and, of course, she's quick to point out it's the first one that hit number one on the new york times bestseller list. [laughter] but, actually, i enjoy very much working with my wife, so certainly i'll be doing that from now on. fortunately, it does tend to come pretty easily. it's very much like speaking. when i give a speech, you know, i don't have a written text. i just go up there and, you know, i survey the situation, i ascertain what kind of audience we have, ask, you know, i'll have a few points that i want to make sure that i make which i might have written on a card, and i just start speaking. basically, i write same way. you know,